1. I went to Austin weekend before last to help get Grandma ready to move into an assisted living facility. It was in the mid-eighties, while Portland was barely breaking 50 degrees. This is the time of year when you want to be anywhere but Portland. On the flight back, the full moon was rising (it would have been eclipsed, actually, had we been farther east). It was behind dark clouds, but they were so thin it shone clear through them—so it looked like the moon was just a mile or two away, flying along with us.

2. I smoked a brisket and made pintos last weekend, so I've been eating almost exclusively brown food for the last week. The brisket isn't very good out of the fridge, so we're going to turn it into tsimmis soon. Barbecue tsimmis.

3. The cops cleared out the house next door and the owner had the locks changed, so everyone on the block is very happy. Now if we can just get the owner to clear out all the crap from the back yard.. Spray painting "no trespassing" on plywood and nailing it to the back door seems to be a great way to attract trespassers.

4. Very tired today, and yesterday. Maybe coming down with the sick that's going around the office. Blah.

5. We leave for China in two weeks and a few days. Our passports should be at the Chinese consulate in New York now, waiting for approval.

6. So tired..

Molly and I spent last weekend at Skamania Lodge, her treat—Yay for women's lib! (My return present was getting the sewer line cleared out this morning, so some gender roles still stand.) It was cold, grey and windy, expensive and crowded. But we'd never been there before, and we had a good time.

Here's my favorite photo from the trip:





At first, I wished I'd centered it a little more evenly, with some padding on the right of the sundial, but on second glance I really like how the way it's cropped mirrors how it's nestled into the rock.

One month until we leave for China, and my passport renewal application has finally shown up in the system. Estimated delivery: March 29th. That leaves only around 11 days to get the visa taken care of. No fun. I think I can throw cash at the problem, though, and get them to push the application through the pipeline. So that's what today is all about: paying people to make sure crap flows properly.

(swimming update: two miles total in just over an hour tonight. brought all 10 1:30 interval 100s in under 1:20, so next time I'll go for 1:25. my 500 came in under 6 minutes, which means I can't count and actually swam 450.)

Oh no. I've reached the point where I'm commenting on other people's blog posts on my weblog. I was writing a comment to this post by Claire over at Urban Honking's Universe blog, but then I kept writing, and then, oh god, here I am.

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Almost everything in the natural world that casts light does so from above; so, nearly everything we see has a shadow under it. Since it's an almost-universal feature, the visual cortex very likely processes this early in the pipeline to help distinguish separate objects and gauge size and distance. Adding a shadow to the bottom of a window is an easy and cheap way to make it stand out. But shadows can swing left or right depending on where the sun is; there's no natural direction there.

You're close when you suggest that the shadow placement on computer windows is due to the way we read, but I think there's really nothing psychological about it. Pixels in the window were indexed from the top-left corner of the window, so if you put the shadow on the bottom (which you would anyway) and to the right, you don't have to worry about a one-pixel offset: the origin point for the window is the same whether it has a shadow or not. As for why they chose the top-left corner for the origin: that's because pixels in a frame buffer are traditionally ordered in the same left-right, top-down style of CRT scan lines, which in turn follow the manner of Roman text we've inherited. (I suddenly feel like James Burke.)

My hunch is that the shadows on cheesy web buttons lean to the right only because the "sun" position on the Windows or Mac OS 9 desktop is up-left, so it seemed natural for the designers to orient them that way. I doubt it has any significant psychological effect whether they go left or right, or any effect on readability.

(Also, note that the shadow on the OS X aqua "candy" button you show above doesn't actually lean left or right—it goes straight down. The Apple designers decided that the imaginary light source doesn't need a left-right orientation since they've got these fancy new composited shadows that stretch out of both sides of the window and no longer need to rely on a single pixel border.)

Now, what I'd like to see is window "lighting" that matches the time of day: shadows go straight down at noon, and shift as the day goes by. Right before sunset you've got long, gorgeous shadows streaking across the desktop, and after everything has a golden-red hue.

Or, if you're in Portland and it's somewhere between October and May, everything's just kind of grey.